Fear was not able to stop me that day, as it sometimes did. Most of us, if not all, have some kind of fears. A lot of my friends have fear of height. Some people have fear of drowning. Fear occurs in different forms and varies in different degree to different people.

I believe that most of us have heard of Richard Branson and his adventures. In case if you haven’t, Richard Branson (pardon me it’s Sir Richard Branson) is the man behind the Virgin. I only got to know more about him recently when I read two of his books, ‘Losing My Virginity‘ and ‘Screw It, Let’s Do It.’

In one of his adventures shared in ‘Screw it, Let’s Do It’; he and Per Lindstrand became the first to cross the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon. However, they did not know how to land. They faced the danger of crashing and burning with the leftover full fuel tanks. When they finally managed to do away with the fuel tanks, their hot-air balloon became too light and shot up into the sky, out of control. Their plan B was to land on the beach where they won’t hurt people but they missed the beach because of thick fog. Per Lindstrand eventually jumped into the stormy sea from 56 feet up. Sir Richard Branson was alone in the hot-air balloon and was carried towards Scotland. He jumped into the grey sea eventually and was picked up from the icy water by helicopter which was out searching for him. Per Lindstand was also in the sea for hours and was rescued just before he froze to death.

Did he not know what fear is? Or maybe he did. As he shared in his book, ‘Screw It, Let’s Do It,’ “… no one had ever flown that far in a balloon before. It was mad. It was too risky … What would happen if I died?” However, he shared that he couldn’t resist a challenge and the chance to try something new. Probably that was how I felt too when I took the jump last year. I wouldn’t compare my little feat with his adventures but I do see a slight similarity. I too, look upon my fear as a challenge.

“Always do what you are afraid to do.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just like the quotation above, I want to do what I am afraid to do. The more I fear, the more I want to do it as long as the things that I planned on doing do not cause harm to others or to myself. I had previously shared about my fear in public speaking or presentation a few years back. Back then, I was practically thrown into the position to make presentation to a group of audience on stage. I was not ready and I had never done it before. I had jelly legs and the first presentation did not go exactly how I wanted it to be.

Was it a failure? Yes, as long as I chose to give it up totally. Before one can be really good at something, one has to start taking the first step. As the saying, “A journey of a thousand miles begin with a first step“; we must be prepared to take the first step and learnt from it. One can never be ready to do something. One can be well prepared, but one cannot be ready. I continued to put myself in the position to make presentation until a point of time where I was making presentation to a group of audiences about the size of 50-60 comfortably and engaging them at the same time. Have I conquered my fear of public speaking? I have not completely, I just acknowledged its presence, face it squarely and co-exist with fear.

How would you respond to fear? Different folks different strokes. What is more important is that it must work for you. Whichever way one may choose, one has to first acknowledged the presence of fear and then face it. Last but not least, I would like to share with you one last thing that Sir Richard Branson said from his book, ‘Screw It, Let’s Do It‘; “… whatever it is you want to achieve in life, if you don’t make the effort, you won’t reach your goal. So take that first step. There will be challenges. You might get knocked back – but in the end, you will make it.” Have faith in yourself and move on fearlessly.

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.” — Marie Curie

I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me; I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.

This is the prepared text of the address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, who spoke at Commencement on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.